Research

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the model of educational vision Black teachers fostered and were deeply committed to greatly mirrored what we today regard as anti-racist systems of knowledge and educational practices. My dissertation-to-book project attends to the understudied educational activism, pedagogies, and praxes of local Black teachers during the Early Black History Movement through a biographical analysis of the life and times of Jane Dabney Shackelford, a Black female educator from Terre Haute, Indiana who was most active during the era of Jim Crow segregation. 

The educational trajectory and systems of teaching Shackelford and her peers embodied serve as a useful tool for conceptualizing the significant ways in which local schoolteachers cultivated an intentional educational and intellectual practice fueled by what Anna Julia Cooper referred to as the “moral forces of reason and justice and love.” 

The first contribution of this project entails the study of the life and times of an influential—yet understudied—historical actor as a window into the education-activism of Black teachers during the Early Black History Movement. Second, this project contributes to the growing scholarship on Jim Crow North, by challenging ahistorical, flattened, and selective narratives that loom in popular remembering of the era of Jim Crow segregation. Third, the use of the robust repository that makes up the Shackelford papers seeks to excavate the scholarly and intellectual work and the ethos that guided her educational activism and that of her community of educators.

The indispensable role local Black educators played during the Jim Crow era of segregation ruptured the curricular distortions of Black life as they instilled pride and opened the minds of their students to future possibilities. The process of restoring the educational strivings still cloaked in the shadows of history is vital to excavating the story of the Early Black History Movement, and our responsibilities to this legacy.